11 - Blurring your text while it moves

Hey there,
My workspace doesn't display the click box options in the text box row to create item specific motion blurring. I definitely have the global blur setting button above. Just not sure how to get the rest to show up. Any help? Thank you!

Hey, welcome to this video, this video were going to cover something called motion blur. Motion blur is your secret source. Easing was cool, blurring is better. It just adds that believability because we've got some static type, it had that power pointy feel to it, we added some easing to give it a little bit of real world real life motion and motion blur is the next step to adding a bit of slickness to it. And it just means that when it’s moving, its blurring. Like it does in real life when something’s running really fast in front of you it blurs when it’s moving because we cant get a really crisp image of it. It happens on film with live action, were going to fake it with static text. There's no reason it should blur, other than it looks good.

To do it, its pretty easy, there's two things you need to turn on. You need to turn this button on here. This particular button turns it on globally. So if you hover above it watch, it says enables motion blur in all layers with motion blur switch to set. Alright so to preview it, its space bar. And you can see no motion blur. We've turned it on but nothing happens. So lets turn it on globally. That says I am prepared to do motion blur to the layers that you tell me. And that’s what we do, we've got two layers here I'm going to twirl this little arrow up to make it look nice and clean. You can see here, I can add motion blur. See the same little icon here to the squares underneath. So I can add it to this one, I can add it to this one underneath but it doesn’t move so it could be on or off, it doesn’t matter because its not moving. Anything you’ve animated with key frames you need to turn it on. So you’ve got to turn it on twice, there globally and you turn that one off afterwards. And now watch, lets get it back to the beginning. Be prepared, easing plus motion blur equals coolness. It just blurs while its moving, yes, you might be thinking that’s not as cool as Dan makes out, I love it.

To extreme it up a little bit because it’s not really moving that fast, watch this, its kind of (Dan’s sound effect) see even I was a tiny bit underwhelmed. What I'm going to do is twirl down this, find my key frames and to speed it up right, its taking nearly 2 seconds to get across here, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do is move you my friend to one second, its going to be a lot faster because its got a shorter distance to cross. Watch this, now were talking motion blur. I'm going to shrink this one up as well so it’s about half a second, then (Dan’s sound effect) there we go, motion blur.

With it off, power pointy, with it on, super sexy. Nice. So motion blur is on for this, why would you have two buttons for it, it’s a bit silly. Its means that say you’ve got 100 layers here and don’t be afraid if you do get up to 50 layers in after effects its totally part of it if you’ve got lots of things animating around, that’s what happens, so what you can do or what motion blur does is it stretches the machine out a little bit in trying to blur it. So what you can do is say you're not really worried about the look of it, you're just technically doing some stuff and you're sick of it taking forever, you can say globally, even though were on for all of the layers, maybe on for 50 of the 100, you can turn it off globally just while you're previewing, just to slow stuff down. You’ve just got to make sure you turn it back on when you’ve finished to get that lovely smooth blurriness.

Alright, that’s how to add motion blur and that’s the second step in the two step process of making things look really slick in after effects. Were going to cover a bunch more stuff but when you're teaching yourself and you're doing basic type animation, turn those two on, bit of easing, bit of motion blur and you will look awesome.